“We did what we set out to do when we sought this battle,” Yamamoto said. “The Americans will not come forward. They will not invade Hawaii. The islands will remain our bastion, not theirs.”
“Well done!” Captain Tomeo Kaku said. “And I say, ‘Well done!’ to the crews of Shokaku and Zuikaku in particular. However fine the ships are, they are new, and their crews do not have so much experience working as a team as Akagi’s does. But no one will say they are not veterans now.”
“Arigato,” said Captain Jojima Takatsugu of Shokaku. Captain Yokokawa started to nod his thanks, then grimaced and thought better of it. Eyeing that thick pad of bandages on his shoulder, Genda couldn’t blame him.
“We are not finished, though,” Yamamoto said sternly. “This is a victory, but not one that will end the war. The Americans paid a high price, but they will be back when they feel strong enough. We have to see what we paid, what we can do to make good our losses, and how best to face the Yankees when they return—for they will.”
“Are you sure, sir?” Captain Kaku asked. “How many times must we crush them before they know we are their masters?”
“How many times?” Yamamoto shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know that what we’ve done so far isn’t enough. We have awakened a sleeping giant, and we have yet to see everything he can do.”
“What is our best course, then, sir?” Genda asked.
“To make these islands strong. To make the fleet that protects them strong,” Yamamoto replied. “American arms factories and shipyards are just now getting up to full war production. What we have seen is not a patch on what we will see. Fuchida-san!”
“Yes, sir!” Fuchida still sounded fuzzy—from painkillers, Genda suspected—but Yamamoto’s voice could and would galvanize anybody.
“What were our aircraft losses?” asked the commander of the Combined Fleet.
“Just over a hundred planes, Admiral.” Fuzzy or not, Fuchida had the numbers he needed at his fingertips. Anyone who came to a meeting with Yamamoto unprepared deserved whatever happened to him.
The admiral grunted. “Could have been worse, I suppose. But these were highly trained men, some of the best we had. How soon can we replace them, and how good will the replacements be?”
“As for numbers, sir, we can replace them as soon as the new pilots and radiomen and bombardiers arrive from Japan,” Fuchida replied. “Quality . . . Quality is harder to gauge. Nothing but experience can make a man a veteran. The fliers from Shokaku and Zuikaku know this now.”
“Hai,” Yamamoto said noncommittally. He rounded on Captain Yokokawa. “How long before Zuikaku is back in service?”
“Sir, she’ll have to return to Japan for repairs,” Yokokawa answered. “There’s no help for it. We’re lucky we kept her afloat after the pounding she took. The Americans pressed their attacks with all their strength.”
Another grunt from Yamamoto. He hadn’t been aboard Zuikaku or seen for himself how she was fought. All he could know was that she’d taken much more damage than either of the other Japanese carriers. He said, “A pity the Americans did such a good job of wrecking the navy yard here before they surrendered.”
“They were thorough,” Genda agreed.
“Have the engineers looked at what we’d need to do to get the yard operational?”
Genda’s specialty was air operations. But he was also the man with the answers; Yamamoto’s wasn’t the only head to turn his way. He said, “Sir, I’m told it’s not practical, since we would have to bring all our fuel from Japan. You might want to talk with the engineers, though, to see if things have changed since the last time I checked with them.”
“I’ll do that,” Yamamoto said. “Having to take a ship back more than five thousand kilometers to get it repaired is inefficient, to say the least.”
“The Americans had no trouble maintaining a yard here,” Captain Takatsugu said. “What they can do, we should be able to do, too.”
Just for a moment, Admiral Yamamoto looked angry. Genda knew what to watch for, and when to look. The eyebrows that came together, the lips that thinned . . . The expression vanished almost as fast as it appeared, but Yamamoto did not care for officers who failed to think things through before they spoke. “The Americans are only a little more than half as far from Hawaii as we are. And they have more fuel than they know what to do with. They had no trouble shipping some of it here. We, on the other hand . . .”
He didn’t go on, or need to. Had the USA not cut off oil shipments to Japan, the war never would have started. If everything went well from here on out, Japan wouldn’t have to depend on a rival for the oil she desperately needed. The formerly Dutch East Indies would see to that.
Yamamoto let Captain Takatsugu down easy. “We fought well,” he said. “As long as we do that, all will be well for us.”
“Hai.” Several officers agreed with that. Some of them sounded relieved, too.
Turning to Captain Kaku, Yamamoto said, “I am pleased at how well the damage-control parties have worked here on Akagi. That she can launch planes again is a credit to her officers and men.”
“Thank you very much, sir.” Kaku modestly looked down at his hands. “We were lucky that only one bomb hit us. And the repairs, of course, are emergency makeshifts. She needs much more work.”
That was an understatement. Genda had seen the gaping hole in the hangar deck. The bomb would have done even more damage had it struck while planes were stored there and not in combat.
“I understand,” Yamamoto said. “But you’ve done what’s essential. If the ship has to fight, she can. I don’t expect the Americans to come back to these waters for some time, but I might be wrong. In case I am, we’ll need every carrier and every plane we can get our hands on.”
Genda looked north and east. He didn’t expect the Americans back any time soon, either. They’d just had a lesson. Now they knew how much they didn’t know about conducting carrier operations. With luck, that would be enough to keep them thoughtful for some time. In the meanwhile, Japan would grow stronger, and so would her grip on Hawaii.
Admiral Yamamoto dismissed the meeting. Shokaku’s skipper, and Zuikaku’s, went over the side and down to the boats waiting to carry them back to their carriers. Genda stood with Fuchida on the Akagi’s battered flight deck. Because of the stitches in his belly, Fuchida listed to starboard. The deck put Genda in mind of a man who’d had a head injury and went around forever afterwards with a steel plate in his skull. The repairs here were ugly, but they were functional.
Even through the masuku, Genda tasted the sweetness of the tropical air. He asked Fuchida, “How are you doing?”
“Not so well,” his friend answered. “But I’m getting better. How about you?”
“The same, more or less,” Genda said. “We made it through the fight. That’s the most important thing. Now we take our time recovering.”
Fuchida nodded. “That’s right.” He looked back toward some of the planes parked on the flight deck near Akagi’s stern. “From now on, I think we’d better equip all the Nakajimas with torpedoes. In a sea fight, they have a much better chance of scoring a hit than level bombers do.”
“Put it in your action report, Fuchida-san,” Genda said. “It makes good sense to me. As long as we don’t dither between one and the other, we’ll be all right.”
“That would be bad, wouldn’t it?” Fuchida said. “Suppose the enemy caught us while we were switching from bombs to torpedoes in combat. Can you imagine what a Helldiver hit would do then?” He shuddered at the idea.
So did Genda. A carrier caught betwixt and between like that would go up like an ammunition dump—which, in effect, she would be. No damage-control party in the world could hope to save her. With a deliberate effort of will, he made himself dismiss the frightening possibility. “It didn’t happen,” he said firmly. “It won’t happen, either.”
BEING ABLE TO walk straight felt wonderful to Mitsuo Fuchida. The three weeks since his appendectomy felt l
ike forever, but the doctors had finally taken the stitches out of his abdomen. The one who did the work said, “If people look at you when you go to the public baths, you can tell them you started to commit seppuku but changed your mind.”
He’d chortled loudly. Fuchida didn’t think it was so funny. For one thing, the scar wasn’t quite in the right place for that. For another, the feel of the sutures sliding through his flesh as the doctor snipped them and pulled them out one by one was—not painful, but distinctly unpleasant.
Now he strode across the lawn to one side of Iolani Palace toward the folding chairs set up there. Genda and the two lieutenant colonels, Minami and Murakami, rose to greet him. They bowed. So did he. It made his belly twinge, but only a little.
The Coronation Pavilion hadn’t been used for its original function for most of a lifetime. It hadn’t gone altogether unused since then, though. King David Kalakaua had built it directly in front of the palace, connecting it to the veranda there with a bridge. After he held his coronation ceremony in 1883, the pavilion was moved to the side and became the home of the Royal Hawaiian Band. Now it would again see the crowning of a monarch . . . of sorts.
Fuchida wasn’t sorry to sink into a chair by Genda—who still wore his masuku—and the two Army officers. Other Japanese military men, including Admiral Yamamoto (who’d stayed in Honolulu for the ceremony) and General Yamashita, filled most of the seats on the left side of the aisle. Others were taken by representatives from the Foreign Ministry and by allied diplomats: men from Germany and Italy, from Romania and Hungary and Bulgaria, from Croatia and Vichy France, from Manchukuo and Siam, from the Japanese puppet government of China in Nanking, and from the even less powerful authorities Japan had set up with the aid of nationalists in Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines.
On the right side of the aisle sat local dignitaries: some Hawaiian noble-men and -women, some members of the former Territorial Legislature (most but not all of them of Japanese blood), a couple of justices from the former Territorial Supreme Court, judges from lesser courts (some of them were Japanese, too, and one an immense Hawaiian), and various other prominent people. Fuchida was a little surprised at how many haoles had chosen to attend, the men in formalwear, often even including top hats, the woman in fancy gowns, most of them of glowing silk.
Some people were conspicuous by their absence. Fuchida leaned toward Genda and murmured, “I see Abigail Kawananakoa decided not to come.”
Genda nodded. “None of the other candidates we interviewed is here, either. Did you expect anything different?”
“No, not really,” Fuchida admitted. “I’m glad this many of the Hawaiian alii did show up.” He chuckled. “Now the ones who did and the ones who didn’t can start cutting each other dead at parties.”
His friend laughed at that till he started to cough. He sent Fuchida a reproachful stare once the spasm passed. “See what you made me do.”
“So sorry,” Fuchida said. They grinned at each other.
Under the ribbed copper dome of the Coronation Pavilion—decorated with Hawaiian coats of arms and supported by eight concrete columns—stood the Anglican Bishop of Honolulu in full ecclesiastical regalia. Fuchida wondered how the haole had been persuaded to officiate. Maybe Stanley Owana Laanui had taken care of that. Fuchida suspected the bishop would have been more likely to listen to him than to the Japanese occupying authorities. Or maybe the occupiers had just held a gun to his head and told him that doing what he needed to do would improve his chances of living to get a little grayer. He was here. That was what counted.
The Royal Hawaiian Band was here, too, though displaced from its usual venue. The bandmaster raised his baton. The band struck up a tune. Fuchida would not have recognized it, but he knew what it was: “Hawaii Ponoi.” The Hawaiian national anthem was particularly appropriate to the occasion, with words by King David Kalakaua and music by Henry Berger, the fork-bearded Prussian who’d created the Royal Hawaiian Band.
On the right side of the aisle, people sang in both Hawaiian and English. Fuchida caught some of the latter:
“Hawaii’s own true sons
Be loyal to your chief
The country’s liege and lord
The chief.”
He nodded to himself. Yes, that fit the spirit of the day very well.
And here came the coronation procession. First were the bearers of the royal insignia, both imported and native. One man carried the dove-topped royal scepter; another, on a velvet cushion, the golden ring of state; two more bore puloulous—tabu staffs ornamented by crowns of black and white cloth that showed the world the king’s sacrosanctity.
Behind them walked a Hawaiian noblewoman carrying the royal cloak made entirely of yellow mamo feathers. The mamo had been hunted into extinction for those feathers, of which each bird had only tiny patches under the wings. The feather cloak was almost extinct, too; it had been taken out of the Bishop Museum—over the curator’s loud objections—for the occasion.
More Hawaiian nobles followed. They had attendants bearing kahili, which reminded Fuchida of nothing so much as the sponges on sticks used to swab out cannon. Here, though, the sponge part was replaced by red and yellow feathers, which produced a much more pleasing effect. Two of the nobles carried the royal crowns, which were made on the European pattern (though decorated with golden taro leaves) and studded with diamonds, opals, emeralds, rubies, pearls—and kukui nuts.
And behind them marched Stanley Owana Laanui himself, in white tie and tails. With him came the prospective Queen of the restored Kingdom of Hawaii. Cynthia Laanui was a smiling, busty redhead only a little more than half her husband’s age. Fuchida had no trouble figuring out what he saw in her. What she saw in him might be a different question altogether.
The new royal couple went up the half-dozen steps that led into the Coronation Pavilion. The noblewoman who bore the royal cloak carefully draped it over Stanley Owana Laanui’s shoulders. The cloak fell to his ankles. It was, without a doubt, an impressive garment, and one no sovereign anywhere in the world could match. Stanley Laanui took the ring of state and set it on his right index finger. He grasped the scepter in his right hand.
“Let us pray,” the Bishop of Honolulu said. Raising his hands in benediction, he went on, “May the Lord bless us and keep us. May He make His face shine upon us and give us peace. And may He find good what we do here today. This we ask in the holy name of our Savior, His Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
“Amen.” The response came from the right side of the audience, from some of the diplomats on the left side, and from the new royal couple. Fuchida nodded once more. The prayer said enough to satisfy the occupying authorities, yet not so much as to make a mockery of the bishop’s conscience if, as was likely, he didn’t favor the Japanese cause.
Wearing no expression whatever, the bishop set one crown on Stanley Owana Laanui’s head, the other on Cynthia Laanui’s flaming locks. “God bless the King and Queen of Hawaii,” he said in a voice also empty of everything.
Flashbulbs popped. Newsreel cameras had been grinding away all along. The audience applauded, perhaps more politely than enthusiastically. Fuchida and Genda, Minami and Murakami looked at one another and smiled as they clapped. They’d got the job done.
“I thank you,” King Stanley said, looking out over his subjects—and his masters. “The American annexation and occupation of Hawaii were not only illegal and immoral but also disastrous for the Hawaiian people. There are less than half as many Hawaiians alive today as there were fifty years ago.”
Is that why you have a redheaded Queen? Fuchida wondered. Stanley Owana Laanui went on, “Now that these islands are free again, I intend to make them into a kingdom that can feed itself and support itself instead of being caught like a fly in a spiderweb of ties to the mainland. Cooperation with the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere will help Hawaii to achieve this goal.” That was nicely done: he admitted being a puppet without ever naming Japan.
“Now we do not ha
ve to pretend to be Americans any more,” he said—in English. Did he notice the irony, or did it slide past him? Fuchida couldn’t be sure. The new King was shrewd, but whether he was really clever was much less obvious. He finished, “We may choose our own friends once more. With the help of those friends, we will continue to live untroubled lives here in the heart of the Pacific. Thank you.”
The Kingdom of Hawaii’s . . . friends had sunk two U.S. carriers and smashed up a third. As long as they could keep that up, Hawaii would remain untroubled—by the Americans, anyhow. As Fuchida applauded once more, he caught Genda’s eye. Now they had to make sure the newly revived kingdom stayed as independent as Japan wanted it to be—and not a bit more.
Contents
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Days of Infamy Page 55
